One Dream Among Many
by Penelope Wendy Bing
Summary: Moments are lost, in between battles and wars, slipping like forgotten glyphs into the past. Others are saved, to live quietly on. These are some of those moments. Oneshot collection.
1. Waiting

**A/N**- Faeries of Dreamdark is the wonderful work of Laini Taylor, and therefore is not mine. This will be a collection of short oneshots and drabbles, to be updated as inspiration strikes. These will be mostly self-proofread, so please point out any mistakes you may find.

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><p>And Bellatrix watches, and she waits, and nothing ever changes.<p>

It's the waiting that's the hard part, she has to admit. She can handle the dullness of the Moonlit Gardens. She doesn't have a problem talking her voice hoarse telling Fade stories. She misses the old scorch, but separation from him is not the true burden of her imprisonment. It's the sitting, and waiting, and sighing away the years while she desperately wants to be fighting to slow the decline of faeries that she sees so evidently as the millennia slip by.

No, Bellatrix has never been good at waiting. If she had been the patient sort, she would have been another eight hundred years for the world. It's almost funny, seeing how her haste condemned her to twenty-five thousand years of this interminable sitting and watching. But it isn't funny, because every time she thinks of it Kipepeo's memory twists in her gut like the claws of a devil.

Devils. Bellatrix had dedicated her life to disposing of them, but now she almost felt that she understood the devils of this age better than the faeries. She could imagine, now, how they must feel trapped in their bottles for tens of thousands of years. It wasn't like that at first, when her friends and relatives slowly filtered in, but now her ties to the world and her faerie company in the Moonlit Gardens are mostly gone. She's almost like a devil herself, alone in a prison, with only the knowledge that she'll probably never leave to mull over. No wonder, when devils are set free from their bottles, they escape with such violence. She would want to get out as quickly as possible herself.

She wonders if the waiting is the worst part for them, too.

Waiting! Bellatrix is bloated with it. She wants no more part of it. She just wants to shove her plate of patience away and go to her spark, but she can't. She can't do that to the world. To the child of dreams she helped bring about. To Kipepeo.

And then Snoshti brings the girl, young and bright and perfect, to her, and Bellatrix is reminded that some things are worth waiting for.


	2. A Matter of Marriage

Magpie had been dreading this for quite some time. It had been bad enough when she was merely visiting the Moonlit Gardens in her spare time. Now that she and Narael were there to stay... She took his hand and gave him a smile full of much more confidence than she felt. Narael smiled back, but he looked a little sick to his stomach. She hoped it was just homesickness for the world, but she had the distinct feeling it wasn't. She herself felt the finality of her last trip over the familiar bridge move back to make room for her nervousness about the coming meeting.

Souls on the banks murmured greetings to her. They knew that she was there for good now. Magpie was old. She'd lived everything she had wanted to live. Her time had come. Narael said his had too, and indeed he was old as well, but Magpie had the feeling he mostly considered her time to be his.

Narael looked around shyly, taking in the afterworld. And awkwardly trying not to look at the stony blond figure emerging from the expanse of cottages, Magpie noted. She gave his hand a comforting squeeze. She had the feeling it would be he that walked away the more miserable man from the coming confrontation. Her husband had always been too timid. He couldn't argue to save his life. Well, not with strangers.

Talon waited for them on the edge of the crowd, eyes narrowed, arms crossed. He still looked so young. He always would, of course, but every time she saw him Magpie's stomach gave a twist of regret. He'd been barely one hundred and eighty when he died, caught off guard on what should have been a simple find-and-retrieve mission to collect some famous relic or the other. It was probably her greatest regret that she'd been unable to save him, and he'd been unable to ever meet their daughter.

She let go of Narael's hand to embrace Talon briefly, and then stepped back to make introductions.

"Talon, this is Narael. My husband. Narael, this is Talon. My, erm...other husband," she said, gesturing awkwardly between the two of them.

Talon gave Narael an acidic once over, but the other fairy man refused to meet his eyes. The jealousy and quiet rivalry emanating off of both of them was enough to make Magpie squirm.

They stood in silence for a minute, the seconds stretching out impossibly. Just when Magpie began to think she might explode, rescue came in the form of her parents. As soon as she caught a glance of them weaving their way through the crowd toward her, she bolted off.

"Right. Well, I'm going to go talk to my parents. I'll find you later," she called over her shoulder. Both of her husbands shot her looks that screamed _how could you leave me alone with _him, but she didn't look back.

She'd deal with it later. After all, she had forever.


End file.
